Urbanski, with her debut novel, After World, has created a beautiful end for the human race ... An intelligent, defiant novel, akin to any of Annalee Newitz’s writings while also brushing shoulders with some of the great questions of identity and consciousness brought up in the works of William Gibson. Like those authors, Urbanski has written what might be described as science fiction.
In contrast to other post-apocalyptic novels, Urbanski’s descriptions of nature are lush and stunning, and it’s clear how much place influenced this novel. Just as Octavia Butler took inspiration from suburban Los Angeles in her dystopic fiction, the forests and natural world of New York State has inspired Urbanski to create a world pulsing with life (just not human life). She resists the urge to destroy the landscape of this post-apocalyptic world and instead has the devastation manifest in the bodies of the surviving humans ... This profound reflection on the act of writing is really what the book is all about. Urbanski examines witnessing, writing, and subjectivity through the lens of artificial intelligence, yet the questions she poses remain uniquely human.
Urbanski’s debut imagines what the future of humanity and the planet might be ... Fans of sf, cli-fi, and apocalyptic novels will enjoy this fresh take on familiar genres.
Debbie Urbanski writes the kind of short stories that I want to twist into a knot and hand to my younger self. There’s something about these stories that speaks directly to the questions writers of so-called 'cli-fi' are trying to answer: how do we write about the climate crisis or the end of the world? What is the role of storytelling in representing it? It’s impossible to recommend one of her short stories because I can’t choose just one. Luckily, though, now that her debut novel After World is out, I don’t have to. You need to read this ... I wish we all could have come into this decade having already read After World. Urbanski offers a counterpoint to fast-paced apocalypse stories that seem unproblematically invested in the survival of their human characters. This story is slow, and lonely, and bleak—but it offers something very concrete for us to think about regarding the relationship of stories to the world. Now that I’ve finished reading the novel, I can turn back to page one and make Sen and Ellis live again.
Complex, experimental, and ambitious ... The resulting mystery is not a page-turner, but regarded as a style-first character exploration, Urbanski’s experiments in point of view are technically fascinating, creating thought-provoking and often poetic juxtapositions. Viewed through a genre SF lens, however, the apocalyptic setting fails the most basic test of initial plausibility and thus never gains imaginative traction ... Plenty to chew on.
Experimentally told and steeped in climate crisis grief, this novel is certainly not for everyone. But the ultimate effect is wrenching, fascinating, and unique. A difficult but deeply moving story of grief and love.
